Proust's asthma Not much in the way of new headlines today, so we're going to take a literary approach. I've been reading In Search of Lost Time (a.k.a. Remembrance of Things Past,") Marcel Proust's the seven-volume series in which a man looks over his life from childhood on (at least that's the impression I've got halfway through volume II - Within A Budding Grove).
As I understand it, Proust wrote his 3,000 page masterpiece while he was resting in bed in his final years, his health destroyed by asthma.
While he is described as sickly in volume I (Swann's Way), it is only in the second volume is he specifically diagnosed with asthma. To overcome his first attack, his doctor recommends a tempoary diet consisting wholly of milk, which, much to the astonishment of the narrator's family, does wonders. From then on he is instructed to take both caffeine and alcohol as preventative drugs.
Makes you kind of appreciate modern medicine.
4:58:01 PM | permalink |
|
